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Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Gothic

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Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Gothic ABSTRACT Title of Document: PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY AND THE GOTHIC David J. Brookshire, Doctor of Philosophy, 2009 Directed By: Professor Neil Fraistat, Department of English My dissertation participates in a developing body of Romantic criticism that seeks to trace the crucial, yet uncertain, relationship between Romanticism and the Gothic. Recent studies argue persuasively for the influence of gothic aesthetics on the major poets of the Romantic era, yet surprisingly little attention has been given to Percy Bysshe Shelley, for whom, more than any other Romantic, the gothic sensibility arguably provided the most powerful and lasting influence during the course of his career. Shelley’s earliest publications, including his two gothic novels—Zastrozzi, a Romance and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian—have received scant critical attention and demand an analysis that approaches these early works with the same theoretical rigor that his mature poetry receives. I employ the insights of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to interrogate my distinction between the Shelleyan subject of Romanticism and the Shelleyesque subject of Gothicism. Where the Shelleyan gaze finds synthesis, desire, pleasure, sublimity, benevolence, and being; the Shelleyesque gaze finds antagonism, drive, jouissance, monstrosity, perversion, and lack. Rather than an undisciplined juvenile phase of Shelley’s development, the Shelleyesque continues to operate throughout his mature poetry in unsettling and provocative ways, particularly in works such as Prometheus Unbound—generally considered to be Shelley’s most idealistic attempt to transcend the political, sexual, and psychological antagonisms associated with the gothic tradition—further complicating the uncanny relationship between Romanticism and the Gothic. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY AND THE GOTHIC By David J. Brookshire Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2009 Advisory Committee: Professor Neil Fraistat, Chair Professor Orrin Wang Professor Marshall Grossman Professor Jason Rudy Professor Samuel Kerstein © Copyright by David J. Brookshire 2009 ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction................................................................................................ 1 Chapter One: Zastrozzi, a Romance: Paranoiac Fantasy and the Semblance of Subversion................................................... 16 Chapter Two: St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian: Gothic Drive and Romantic Desire................................................................ 60 Chapter Three: The Wandering Jew: Superstition and Subjectivity....... 97 Chapter Four: The Gothic Prometheus................................................... 132 Bibliography............................................................................................. 180 1 INTRODUCTION My dissertation participates in a developing body of Romantic criticism that seeks to trace the crucial, yet uncertain, relationship between Romanticism and the Gothic. Michael Gamer, in Romanticism and the Gothic, points out that “at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century . neither ‘gothic’ nor ‘romantic’ had yet taken their modern meanings” and that the Gothic is rather “a discursive site crossing the genres” (2-3). Recent studies such as Gamer’s, Anne Williams’s Art of Darkness: A Poetics of Gothic, Thomas Pfau’s Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, Robert Miles’s Gothic Writing, David Richter’s The Progress of Romance, Stephen Bruhm’s Gothic Bodies, and Ellen Brinks’s Gothic Masculinity, argue persuasively for the influence of Gothic aesthetics on the major poets of the Romantic era. Miles and Williams, in particular, inform my approach to the Gothic. For Miles, the Gothic is not a set of conventions, but a “a ‘carnivalesque’ mode for representations of the fragmented subject. Both the generic multiplicity of the Gothic, and what one might call its discursive primacy, effectively detach the Gothic from the tidy simplicity of thinking of it as so many predictable, fictional conventions” (4). Similarly, for Anne Williams the Gothic “outlines a large, irregularly shaped figure, an irregularity that implies the limitations of language—appropriate for the category containing [the] unspeakable ‘other’” (23). Ultimately, for Williams, the Gothic “is a discourse that shows the cracks in the system that constitutes consciousness, ‘reality’” (66). Williams, as does Jerrold Hogle, models her 2 approach on Julia Kristeva’s theory of the “abject,” or the “throwing off” of fundamental inconsistencies of our being. According to Kristeva, the “abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I” (1) and that there is “nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire is founded” (5). In terms of the Gothic, Hogle argues that characters in Gothic fiction “deal with the tangled contradictions fundamental to their existence by throwing them off onto ghostly or monstrous counterparts that then seem ‘uncanny’ in their unfamiliar familiarity . .” (5). As impressive and important as these recent studies are, surprisingly little attention is given to Percy Bysshe Shelley, for whom, more than any other Romantic, the Gothic arguably provided the most powerful and lasting influence during the course of his career. Although Shelley claimed, in an oft- quoted letter to Godwin, that by 1812 he was no longer a “votary of Romance,” his reading habits and poetic interests suggest instead that what he had given up was not an interest in the Gothic itself but the well-worn conventions of the “Old Gothic” of Walpole and Radcliffe that had since become the object of satire and ridicule. We know from Mary Shelley’s Journal1—the best source for tracking Shelley’s reading habits—that both Mary and Percy continued to read (and read outloud to friends) a number of Gothic texts, which included, among many others, William Beckford’s Vathek; Charles Brockden Brown’s Weiland, Ormond, Edgar Huntley, and Arthur Merwyn; Charlotte Dacre’s Zafloya; Godwin’s Caleb Williams and St. Leon; Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon; Charles Maturin’s Fatal Revenge; or the Family of Montorio (1807) and J. 3 Bertram (1816); Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (in which Shelley is playfully satirized in the character of Scythrop); John Polidori’s The Vampyre; along with all of Matthew Lewis’s and Ann Radcliffe’s works. Shelley also enjoyed the Gothic productions of Germany, which included Goethe’s Faust; Frederick Schiller’s The Robbers and The Ghost Seer; and the aptly titled Phantasmagoriana, a French translation of a collection of ghost stories (translated into English in 1812 as Tales of the Dead). In fact, Thomas Love Peacock remarked that “Brown's four novels, Schiller's Robbers, and Goethe's Faust were, of all the works with which he was familiar, those which took the deepest root in his mind, and had the strongest influence on his character . He devotedly admired Wordsworth and Coleridge, and in a minor degree Southey . but admiration is one thing and assimilation is another; and nothing so blended itself with the structure of his interior mind as the creations of Brown.”2 Shelley’s earliest publications, including his two gothic novels— Zastrozzi, a Romance and St. Irvyne; or, The Rosicrucian—have received scant critical attention and demand an analysis that approaches these works with the same theoretical rigor that his mature poetry receives. My study of the importance of Shelley’s early gothic works attempts to fill a gap in Shelley scholarship by establishing a more detailed reading of Shelley’s early works and to argue that Shelley’s gothic sensibility is fundamental to fully appreciating the psychological complexities and antagonisms in his mature poetry, using as my test case his great lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound. Throughout my study, I employ the insights of Lacanian psychoanalytic 4 theory to interrogate the distinction between the Shelleyan subject of Romanticism and the Shelleyesque subject of Gothicism. I resist the temptation to literalize this split or to apply a rigid definition to either his Gothic or Romantic works, terms I use provisionally. Where the Shelleyan gaze finds synthesis, desire, pleasure, sublimity, benevolence, and being; the Shelleyesque gaze finds antagonism, drive, jouissance, monstrosity, perversion, and lack. What will become clear in my reading, is that these two designations operate antagonistically across the body of his writing and characterize the aesthetic tension in Shelley that has traditionally been defined in terms of skepticism and idealism. Rather than an undisciplined juvenile phase of Shelley’s development (as many critics have traditionally argued), I claim that the Shelleyesque continues to operate in unsettling and provocative ways throughout his mature poetry, particularly in Prometheus Unbound, generally considered to be Shelley’s most idealistic attempt to transcend the political, sexual, and psychological antagonisms associated with the gothic tradition. I argue that the Gothic, for Shelley, provides the aesthetic ground through which his most idealistic moments are mediated. It functions as the “Real” that always returns to its place as a site of failure when the imagination fails or when the aspirations of the Romantic ego are confronted with the void of subjective destitution.
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